


Mr. Warren's Profession

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Avon don't impress Blake much, Kink Meme, M/M, Prostitution Roleplay, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:36:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1596830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Blake's7 kinkmeme: a "snooty Alpha client/rentboy" roleplay gets derailed by talking about politics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. Warren's Profession

_He is well paid that is well satisfied (Merchant of Venice)_

Say what you like about Avon, you can’t deny that he’s thorough. I suppose anyone could have curated a costume from the Wardrobe Room (although I did like the boots with the heavy tread and the dozen or so eyelets, I don’t think I’d seen those before). The leather jacket and tight trousers went without saying. The rips in the white knitted shirt were artistically placed, and, dear god, was that a tattoo peeking through one of them? I was diverted for a moment wondering if sheets of them were available in the Wardrobe Room or if he’d had to cadcam it and print it out. 

He lounged against the wall, quite decoratively, one boot up on the wall. His knee was turned out for a hint of what was below the soft fabric. Just a hint, though, the room was fairly dark. Avon could lounge vertically against thin air, so in the presence of an actual wall, he gave it lots. 

The piece de resistance, however, was the projected image of a brick wall against the nubbly beige surface of the cabin. He had even added graffiti—“Servalan Sux Dik” in fluorescent yellow was a nice touch.

A cigarette burned in his hand. I took it from him, took a drag, and crushed it out in the “A Present from Del-10” mug on his desk. I leaned forward and trailed the smoke between his parted lips. He shivered. “Filthy habit,” I said.

“Filthy night,” he said. Then I noticed that he had sprayed the shirt with water—it clung invitingly—and his hair was damp. Our last mission had been to an Undomed World. It turned out that we were there in the last week of the monsoon season. I don’t think I’ll *ever* hear the last of it. 

“Have you got a place?” he said. “Give you a whole night for the price of one go, just to get out of the wet.” 

“I have a flash motor parked ‘round the corner,” I said. “I thought we could go there.”

“What sort?” he asked eagerly. I thought that would appeal to him. After that business with Sarkoff, he’d mentioned that he’d always wished for his own automobile. 

“A Jaguar,” I said, although it’s one of those words that you’ve seen written down but never heard, so I don’t know if it should be two syllables or three. No more does Avon, of course, although most days he’d disagree with me just to have something to quarrel about. 

I suspect that I’ve never been with anyone quite as obsessive about sex as Avon (but then, I’ll never know). It’s a hothouse existence for us, and he hasn’t much else to occupy his mind. He’s not like Vila, he can’t just stare at the wall and be glad nobody’s shooting at us. When I have to worry about Avon getting bored, then it’s Muggins doing the boring. So when we were having a sleepy and inconsequential conversation about little games that might spice up what we certainly wouldn’t be doing any more of that night at our age, one of the scenarios was “rentboy and snooty Alpha client” (or should I say “renter and rentier”?) Two of his favorite things at once, you can see why he’d like it. 

The funny part is that the Federation overreached itself. Even if my dossier shows a decade, subjectively, I’ve only been at this revolution lark for a few years. I like to think that, without interference, my political passions would have been undiminished. But that’s not likely, is it? Between the endless committee meetings and the circular firing squads, I would at the very least have grown tired and cynical, exhausted by the compromises I would have had to make even before reaching power. Thanks to my enemies, however, it’s all still fresh for me, with something new to accomplish each day, in the greatest cause of all. God help me, I’m a happy man. And Avon isn’t. 

I’ll always do whatever it takes to keep my crew safe, but Avon is the only one I really need (although Cally would be invaluable to rebut accusations of Terran-centrism in my administration). Once I’m in power, I’ll have the keys to things, so I won’t need Vila to open them! And Jenna is a fine pilot…but not the second-best pilot in the Federation. 

There can’t be real freedom as long as no one understands computers except a small, hieratic priesthood. Those skills will have to be disseminated throughout society. In the meantime, I can’t establish a government, and then run it, without Avon’s talents. If the implication is that I must go through Tuppence Coloured when I’d just as soon have Penny Plain….so be it.

“Before we go over to my car and, you know…do you have to…well, report in to anyone?” I said delicately. I hoped he wasn’t expecting me to produce hard currency. 

“A ponce? No, that’s for girls. I don’t need anyone. I can take care of myself. Anyway, I’m a mechanic, I don’t do this all the time.”

“Then why do it at all?”

“It’s the twenty-seventh of the month, Squire,” he said. (Actually it was the fourth, but I assumed there must be some relevance.) 

“And?”

“I get paid on the first. The old trout who rents me a room gets paid every week, so it’s out on the street or out on the street. I opted for the former.” (He shook his head, reminding himself to stay in character.) “Food, tram fares, clothes, taxes…well, that’s how you lot like it, isn’t it? Underpay us so we can’t make ends meet, and then it’s cheaper for you to get your end away because we’ve got to get money somehow or anyhow.”

I shrugged. “I’ve no particular need to economize. There are parlor houses that would be happy to run an account for me,” I said. “Or outcall agencies. I must be here because…I want something sordid. Dirty.” 

“Dangerous,” he said.

“Exciting,” I agreed. 

And then a siren moaned and a beam of yellow light dazzled my eyes and we both froze in place, scarcely daring to breathe. When the beam swept past, and the siren receded, we were jubilant, and celebrated our escape in each other’s arms, kissing madly, which gave me time to realize that Avon must have set up the light and sound effects.

Avon shrugged out of the jacket, dropped it on the floor, and knelt on it, rather like Sir Walter Raleigh if he had been courtier and sovereign at once. He reached for the zipper pull on my trousers.

“No,” I said. “No?” he questioned. “What, then? Back seat of your motor?”

“Stay there. As you were. But don’t use your hands,” I said. “Put them behind your back.” I held my breath, wondering if I’d pushed things too far and play would be interrupted on account of rain—or internecine warfare (what is a necine, anyway?). But then he stretched his arms behind him. There was a mirror on the door of the cupboard, so I could see that he laced his fingers together and then turned them the other way. Perhaps for better balance? I was going to protest—I’d meant for him to cross his wrists behind his back, but I decided that I hadn’t *said* that. 

I had a moment of fear that I’d be alpha-testing some sort of trouser-removal ray that he had hooked up on the off-chance, but he pressed his face to the bulge in my trousers. I patted the top of his head (you’d think he’d be the one with hair that resists a lover’s hand, wouldn’t you? But it felt nice, to stroke or to push my fingers into ). Avon found the zipper tab with his teeth, and pulled it down slowly, stopping a few times to explore the unfolding landscape with his tongue and with rather more teeth than if my pants hadn’t been in the way. 

I told him to wait, once again, and used my fingers to open out the slice in his shirt. The thin fabric tore, but after all, it came from my Wardrobe Room, didn’t it? The design was a multi-spoked wheel, perhaps four centimeters in diameter, elaborately worked with a black outline with green spokes filigreed in red. I wonder what it meant to him. Probably he just liked the look of it.

Eventually he got the zipper all the way down and my prick was in his mouth and he was sucking as if he worked on consultants’ hourly rates and not piecework. And worth every credit, may I say. 

As it was only a fantasy commercial transactions, I thought it was unfair for him to do all the work, so I said, “That’ll do for now. Stand up.” He did, and I flourished a hand to show that he should stand facing the wall. His hands were still behind his back; I took one wrist in each of my hands and held them against the wall, above his head. He sighed and closed his thighs around me, it was marvelous, like a spanner in velvet. There was absolutely nowhere for him to go, he realized it and in just a few thrusts we were both finished, he could let the wave of absolute surrender wash over him. 

He did up the zip on my trousers in a respectful valedictory, and we staggered to the bed as if it were ten kilometers away rather than five steps (or six, we went around so as not to tread on the leather jacket). We sat down. I couldn’t remember which side the drive was on the imaginary automobile, but Avon was already running one hand over the dashboard (I could see him seeing the burled, polished wood) and had the other on my thigh. 

“All right, you drive then,” I said generously (and a bit recklessly, would a civilian Service Grade other than a professional chauffeur know how to drive an automobile? In fact, the person I was pretending to be would probably have a mutoid driver when he wasn’t sneaking out trying to get his end away). Good thing the automobile didn’t exist, Avon was driving much too fast. 

“Coordinates?” he said, and I made some up. After half a minute or so, he pretended to stop the automobile, and I envisioned it narrowly missing one of the bad plaster imitations of classical statuary at each side of the gate. 

Avon looked around sharply. “Are there guards?”

I looked at where my wristchron would be. “They won’t come around for another ten minutes. Come on.” 

I called theatrically, “Good evening, Mrs. Thorpe,” and turned to Avon. “My housekeeper. She’s just a few rooms away, you see. She’ll hear me if I’m in any…distress. She’s quite discreet about instances when I’m not in any distress. The police would be here in minutes, if need be. Your biometrics would be all over the place.”

“If that’s what I wanted, I could cut your throat and vanished with your valuables long before the police arrived, even in an Alpha precinct like this. And if I merely robbed you, or I botched the job and you weren’t quite dead, you’d have to explain exactly how the malefactor…how the criminal got in here without breaking in. You’d have to explain why you invited him.”

“Then I’d just slip the policeman a few hundred to get amnesia,” I said.

“’Round my way, we call it ‘buying a hat,’” he said. “Pointless, really, the visors are standard government issues. But that’s idioms…things that people say…for you. Then again, now that I know where you live, I could drop a credit on you, couldn’t I? Perverts in high places.”

“Who’d believe a nasty little tart like you?”

“They might not, but you wouldn’t know. If you’ve got something, there’s always someone who wants it. So you’re Somebody and I’m Nobody, but then again, you’ve got a lot more to lose.”

“Balance of terror,” I said comfortably. “Well, come on in, here’s the guest bedroom.” (Furnished with not-many portable bibelots.)   
“Downstairs,” Avon said. “Funny, that. Your real bedroom is probably up that grand staircase. Well, my room’s up three flights of stairs, but either way, you’ve got to walk. Of course, I’m always trying to stay off the bits that creak, in case my landlady’s lurking about with her hand out for the rent, or saying that it’s a respectable house, and what am I doing coming home after midnight?” He sat down on the bed, which evidently had stopped being a motor and turned back into a bed, unlaced his boots, and sat down cross-legged like a tailor (or like one of Cally’s meditation sessions). He smoothed his hand over the duvet, then slipped it underneath to feel the bottom sheet. “Lovely, this. The sheets at my lodgings might as well be hessian, comparatively. And the bed’s the size of a boat.” (I thought this was rich, given Avon’s contention, in propria persona, that the beds couldn’t be slept in my two people simultaneously.) 

“What can you expect? It’s a surveillance state. A long time ago, someone wrote about a Panopticon, a prison with watchers set in the middle of a circular building so they could see everyone at all times. It’s come true, is all.”

“Are you a subversive, then, as well as a pervert?” he asked avidly. “I really could shop you for that, they’d be glad to hear it and you couldn’t get out of it as easily as buying PC Plod a new hat.”

“As for that, you had a few words to say on the subject before. I could just turn it around and claim that you were trying to recruit me.”

I must have dozed off. I yawned and opened my eyes, as Avon walked through the door, toweling his hair. I was going to say something about the power of imagination, but I realized that his clothes were different, and quite ordinary. He must have bathed and washed his hair. I couldn’t see if the tattoo was still there, beneath the layers of fabric. I quite missed it already.

“You’re you, aren’t you?” I said. 

“Yes,” he said. “Back to reality. You’ll just have to learn to live with the disappointment.”

“It was very encouraging,” I said. “Either as a sample of the consciousness of the labor classes, or evidence that you’ve thought quite a lot about things you claim never to think about.”


End file.
